Fort Eustis Cultural Resources Management

10/01/2026

SHE WHO RIDES HORSES by Sarah V. Barnes takes place on the steppe about 6000 years ago. Naya’s people have domesticated dogs, cattle, sheep, and goats, but they have to walk everywhere when they take their herds and flocks to new pastures. Naya, daughter of the headman, dreams of befriending one of the horses from a nearby wild herd, whom she calls Rehda (Proto-Indo-European for red).

Naya is the only child of the tribal leader and has been indulged by her parents, but now she’s reaching an age where she’s expected to settle down. She prefers to run wild over the steppe, trying to get close to the horses. Her grandmother supports her in her dream.

During the tribe’s migration to their winter pastures, Naya is one of the scouts. She uses this opportunity to visit the horses. At the same time, Oyuun, a trader from the far north, is passing through with his sons. The elder son, Aytal, tries to shoot one of the horses for food, but Naya, throws herself in front of the arrow and is near-fatally wounded. Since she can’t be moved, Naya’s mother Sata stays with Naya, Oyuun, and Aytal in a small winter camp. Oyuun’s younger son spends the winter with Naya’s people as a guarantee of Oyuun and Aytal’s good behavior.

Naya gradually improves in body but not in spirit. Aytal ventures into the spirit world to look for her and sees her riding Rehda. His spirit guide influences him to sacrifice something dear to him for Naya’s health, and he chooses his bow. From then on, he can no longer shoot straight.

Naya is annoyingly immature a lot of the time. She acts like a modern bratty teenager more than she should. She resents Aytal, which is understandable, and also Oyuun, but she gradually thaws, especially to Aytal, over the winter. Aytal begins teaching her to shoot, and he joins in Naya’s efforts to tame the horses. He even pairs up with another horse special to him, Myräkkä, who appeared, starving, and joined the herd. Naya does eventually manage to ride Rehda, and Aytal rides Myräkkä.

Feelings grow between Aytal and Naya, and also between Oyuun and Sata. But whether anything comes of this, and whether Naya convinces the rest of the tribe that horses are worth domesticating, will have to wait until the sequel. Just when Naya and the others rejoin the larger group in the spring, the book ends abruptly and on something of a cliffhanger. (There is a second book already out, and this is supposed to eventually be a trilogy.)

This is a decent book that might have benefited a little from more dialogue, or at least getting more into Naya’s head during the winter. Although she’s supposedly the main character, she’s withdrawn and emotionally absent from a good part of the book. Some kind of B-plot besides Oyuun and Sata’s slow burn might have made the long winter interlude a little more engaging.

Names in the book are usually words in other languages, usually Proto-Indo-European. (There’s a glossary at the end.) So Naya’s father is Potis, which means master, and he’s the leader of their tribe. While it’s understandable that the author would want to use PIE when possible (as these are the people speaking it), sometimes it seems a little affected. Naya names Rehda’s mother MeHnd (wise one). How is that supposed to be pronounced?

If you like horses, thinking about animal domestication, or steppe settings, this may be a book for you. You might want to have book 2 on hand, though, if being left hanging at the end bothers you.

01/20/2026

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The Fort Eustis Cultural Resource Management Program manages over 200 archaeological sites at Fort Eustis. These sites range from Indigenous sites that are thousands of years old, to a variety of historic sites dating from the 1600s-1900s.

01/02/2026

THE MYSTERY AT JAMESTOWN by Carole Marsh is a kids’ book set at Jamestown and other parts of the Historic Triangle. It’s part of a series of mysteries for kids set at notable places.

Christina and Grant and their grandparents arrive at the Norfolk, VA airport on their way to vacation at Busch Gardens. At the airport they run into Joe, an archaeologist they met during a previous adventure. This changes their plans and they decide to visit Jamestown first. Christina and Grant meet a couple of other kids, Alex (Joe’s son) and Courtney. All is not well at Jamestown: bones are missing and Joe is suspected of stealing them!

The kids receive a series of mysterious notes that direct them to different places around Jamestown, where they don’t do much to solve the mystery but do learn something about history. Their grandparents take them to Williamsburg and Yorktown too, so more history is sprinkled in. Eventually the bad guy is caught, more through luck than through the characters’ actions, and also partly due to his (bad guy’s) own ineptitude.

Why do kids’ books always conflate Historic Jamestowne and Jamestown Settlement? They’re in different places and run by different organizations. Here the kids walk from one to the other, and though the book briefly acknowledges that the settlement is in a different location, it obscures that it’s over a mile, along a road with no sidewalk, and there is a separate entrance fee for the settlement. Also, kids want to read about other kids doing things without adult involvement, but in today’s world it’s not really realistic to think a group of kids no older than 10 can roam around like this without comment.

Also, the kids end up getting trapped at Jamestown Settlement after closing and think they’ll have to spend the night in a reconstructed native house, because they went into the woods to look at a clue and couldn’t find their way out before it got dark. The settlement closes at 5. This book takes place in the summer. There would be over three hours of daylight after closing time.

The grandparents take the kids to “a waterside restaurant overlooking Jamestown.” Billsburg Brewery? That’s the only establishment that’s remotely nearby, though it doesn’t really overlook Jamestown. Of course, in this world, the family “got to Jamestown and checked into their motel,” a motel that’s within walking distance from the excavations at Historic Jamestowne. There is nothing like this in reality.

This nitpicking is all a long way of wondering why authors don’t seem to do basic research. The actual history of English settlement, etc. is accurate, at least. It’s just these details of life around the main characters that are strangely off. The Colonial Parkway is “a pretty brick road” (it’s concrete). A costumed interpreter in Colonial Williamsburg is off on his rounds to “light the gaslights” (they’re electric, and would not have been gas at the time Colonial Williamsburg depicts in any case).

For adults, the mystery, plot, and characters are all a little thin. If you live in the area, the inaccuracies about local matters may annoy you. Kids may not have the same hangups, and there is some decent history in the book. If you were going to vacation in the area it might be something to read as an accompaniment to the trip.

12/01/2025

Who would have thought that there would be more than one book with the plot “women from Goddess-worshiping Old Europe end up among patriarchal horse nomads”? But there is. DAUGHTER OF THE GODDESS LANDS by Sandy Saidak is another take on this story.



As the book opens, Kalie is suffering in both body and mind after some trauma she can’t remember. Those around her tell her she’s been missing for half the year. She can’t remember what happened to her during her absence, but she can’t bring herself to go back to the life she’d planned earlier, which includes a fiancé. Instead she travels westward from the Black Sea region, unable to settle down in one place for long, until she ends up as the town storyteller in a mountain town. Then one day runners come from the east. Raiders have attacked, and Kalie is the only one who might be able to help them.



Kalie accompanies the runners to the city of Riverford, where, as the only one who speaks the invaders’ language, she assists in negotiations. The invaders agree to leave if the city will give them gold, metal weapons, and food. Not having learned that once you’ve paid the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane, the city agrees. Then the invaders add one more request: fifty slave girls.



The city-dwellers are horrified, but Kalie thinks that if they can assemble enough willing volunteers, those women could work from within to bring down the invaders’ tribe. Some people do volunteer, and they head back to the steppes. Most of the women die along the way or soon after, from exposure and abuse, and the survivors are distributed to various warriors as slaves. Kalie ends up in the tent of Maalke, where, eventually, she somewhat befriends his second wife Cassia, who hopes Kalie can help her give Maalke a son. Kalie begins to get a reputation as a healer, and later as a storyteller, among the women of the tribe. She also unofficially adopts a neglected slave child. As the terrible winter ends, Kalie is prepared to escape back to her own people, but then decides to stay and try to save, not just her people from the nomads, but also the nomads from themselves.





This book must have been inspired or at least influenced by THE YEAR THE HORSES CAME. Besides the similarities in the setting and plot, there are a lot of little things. In both books the protagonists call the nomads “beastmen” (because their first glimpse of people riding horses looked to them like some kind of monstrous animal). The westerners are dark and the easterners are blond. The nomad women are swathed in clothing, including some kind of head covering. Wives consider it an honor to join their husbands in death.



Unlike Marrah in THE YEAR THE HORSES CAME, Kalie comes to appreciate and find beauty in some aspects of the nomads’ culture. There is also at least one man who isn’t the stereotypical brute. This book has at least an attempt at nuance, although it probably could have been pursued in a bit more depth.



From a storytelling point of view, there are a few parts of the book that might have been handled differently. The part between the opening when Kalie first comes to awareness and when she’s summoned to help with the attackers at Riverford could probably have been omitted with no harm to the narrative. It’s mostly just getting her from one place to another. It also seems like the story is set up to go one way (the women will work from within to undermine the nomads) and then doesn’t pay off, at least in this volume (Kalie is separated from her compatriots for most of the book and doesn’t have the power to do much). Possibly there’s also supposed to be a message of how stories and storytelling can change the world, but again, the book ends before we can see any results. There are several more books in the series, though.



It doesn’t seem like a ton of archaeological research went into this overall, but there is a nice detail of the nomad women sitting in a way that displays the decoration on the soles of their shoes – possibly inspired by boots found in Pazyryk tombs on the steppe (https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/exquisite-2300-year-old-scythian-womans-boot-preserved-in-the-frozen-ground-of-the-altai-mountains).



The nomads don’t have wheeled conveyances, and for some reason they don’t even have travois to carry their household goods from one place to another. When they move to their winter camp, the women carry most of the gear, even though they’re surrounded by horses. This doesn’t seem to be the most well-thought-out strategy, though it goes with the theme that everything is always terrible for the nomad women.



Overall, this is an okay book. It’s not completely self-contained, because not only is it left open for a sequel, it pretty much demands one to get a satisfactory resolution. Compared to THE YEAR THE HORSES CAME, it’s more willing to at least attempt a more rounded depiction of the horse people’s culture, but the storytelling is a little less skilled in some ways. It’s interesting to compare these two books and see two different takes on the same basic idea.

In the age of  fast fashion , when planned obsolescence, cheap materials, and shoddy construction have become the norm, how startling to encounter a stylish women’s boot that’s truly built to last… …like, for 2300 years. It helps to have landed in a Scythian burial mound in Siberia’s&